I would like to see a small anti virus scanner for usb sticks so when you use a usb stick in a random computer the stick protects itself, updates his definitions on contact and scans also the computer its in on that moment.
I want this too! Right now there’s only Avast but it’s not free and only works for U3 >.<
There’s also ClamWin Portable, free and Open Source, but like Avast for U3 it doesn’t
really protect your flash-drive since it is not write-protected until the scan is completed
so by the time it finds anything nasty chances are it’s to late …
Most Anti-Viruses can scan the USB stick. You just needs to go to MyComputer>Find the USB stick there and see if it’s a opinion that allows you to scan your stick.
Anyway. Why do you people want a USB stick Anti-Virus scanner? There is actually no reasons to have one. Because you only uses your USB sticks for your own right? And you double checks if there is no Viruses on the files you put on the USB Stick.
Cheers.
/Orochimaru
Nope. We mean a scanner on our usb stick that scans any computer it has contact with.
For example:
I use different sticks to support my customers with software and backups. So my stick has contact with hundreds computers and (1) i want to protect my data on the stick (2) i do not want my other customers infected.
ClamWin would not have to worry about infections from an infected hard drive if the USB stick were bootable because the infected system would not be loading any files into RAM. Also, a bootable USB drive with network support would allow you do a network based scan of your computer. Finally, if you have a PE type bootable USB stick, you might be able to run the hard drive’s AV scanner (I haven’t tried this yet, but it should be possible). You can look at:
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/plugins/
and
http://www.ubcd4win.com/custom.htm
There are other considerations for getting this working on a USB drive:
http://gocoding.com/page.php?al=petousb
An afterthought about the above: The bootable USB stick methods that I have seen rely on creating a RAM drive that holds the OS as well as the rest of the contents of the USB stick. The USB drive letter seems to be inaccessible after booting from it. It would be useful to have a portable AV like ClamWin on a USB stick and boot from a CD. The CD could also hold a number of other utilities (like those on the UBCD4WIN) and a current virus signature list could be copied to the USB stick or updated to it after booting from CD. The CD’s OS would not be alterable and the USB stick’s signature file would be updateable.
You can run ClamWin from a CD (RW) (you need to re-burn each time you update the definitions )
Now if only those U3-drives had a larger CD-ROM “partition” …
EDIT : This would work :
You need a USB flash-drive with CD-ROM “partition” and the production-tool so you can
define the size and content yourself .
The drive must also have hardware-encryption of the writable part of the UFD.
Hardware-encryption has the advantage of working on restricted accounts .
Because windows will not recognize the encrypted partition as a supported
file-system and thus won’t automount the partition,any virus present on the host
will not be able to write to the UFD .
Then, after the Virus-scan has completed without issues (runs from the CD-ROM),
you mount the encrypted writable partition .